Coffee Grounds Are The Unlikely Secret To Thriving Strawberry Plants

There isn't much that is more rewarding than growing tasty and juicy produce in your own backyard — and it is especially awesome when you are able to grow something as delicious and vibrant as strawberries. Luckily, these sweet and bright berries are relatively easy to grow but, to get the best-tasting strawberries possible, you may want to try out a few strawberry growing tips and tricks. One strawberry trick that you may not have heard of before involves coffee grounds.

In fact, adding used coffee grounds to the soil around your strawberry plants may help them in multiple ways. As one poster on the gardening forum of Reddit put it, adding coffee grounds to strawberry plants "combined with a lot of water seemed to really boost the growth of [the] new plants." The reason for this is because coffee grounds contain essential nutrients, like nitrogen and carbon, that help with plant health and growth. On top of this, coffee grounds also naturally contain compounds that may help reduce plant diseases by reducing the number of harmful microbes in the soil. While some people believe that coffee grounds can also help make your soil more acidic, this has not been consistently proven and is not necessarily true.

The safest way to add coffee grounds to your strawberries is to first compost them so that the nutrients break down and become immediately available to the plants when added to the soil. However, as not everyone has a compost or worm bin, you may want to add the coffee grounds to your plants directly. The most important thing to remember when adding coffee grounds directly to your garden is that moderation is key. This is essential because adding too many coffee grounds to the surface of the soil may make it more difficult for water to reach your plant's roots. So, in order to not harm your strawberry plants, you should make sure that the layer of ground coffee is less than half an inch. It's also a good idea to water deeply after adding the ground coffee. One benefit of this method is that adding coffee grounds to the garden can also repel skunks.

Another way you can add coffee grounds to your strawberries is by making a liquid fertilizer or tea. To do this, simply mix two cups of ground coffee with five gallons of water and let the mixture steep overnight (if not overnight then at least for a few hours) before pouring it into the soil around your strawberry plants. If you have leftover dry coffee grounds, you can also burn them as a way to keep mosquitoes away while doing yard work outdoors.